Mary Lou Jepsen wants to create a wooly ski hat containing a miniature MRI machine.
Openwater believes telepathy is possible within the next 10 years (iStock)
When a teacher asks her children to put their thinking caps on in the middle of the next decade, it could mean far more than merely encouraging them to be creative.
This, around the 2025 mark, is when a former Facebook executive believes telepathy, communicating via thoughts transmitted through a simple wooly hat, could become a reality.
Mary Lou Jepsen, who was formerly an engineering executive at Facebook's Oculus virtual reality division, and worked at Google and Intel before that, wants to make telepathy a reality through her startup company, Openwater.
Although she doesn't have a working prototype yet, Jepsen believes a lightweight ski hat could house a scaled-down MRI machine, normally used in hospitals and the size of an entire room. The hardware would track the flow of oxygen through the wearer's body, illuminating it with benign, infrared light and acting like a literal "thinking cap".
While telepathy is the ultimate goal, Jepsen's plans for now are focused on using the hat to read a person's thoughts. "If I threw you into an MRI machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of," she told CNBC. "That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking it down."
But the company's future is about sharing thoughts without speaking or typing. "The really big moonshot idea here is communication with thought," Jepsen says. "Right now our output is basically moving our jaws and our tongues or typing [with] our fingers. We're... limited to this very low output rate from our brains, and what if we could up that through telepathy?"
As for a time span, Jepsen says: "I don't think this is going to take decades. I think we're talking about less than a decade, maybe eight years until telepathy."
This approach is similar to that of Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of electric car company Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX.
Through his new company Neuralink, launched in 2016, Musk wants to dramatically speed up humanity's output speed; input (through the eyes and ears) is very fast, but output (through fingers and mouths) is far slower, Musk also reasons.
Openwater believes a scaled-down MRI machine can be fitted to a lightweight woolly hat (Openwater)
But where Musk plans to create real-life cyborgs by asking participants to take injections of nanoparticles pulsing through their bloodstream, Jepsen is taking a non-invasive approach.
Ethics will play a big part in our telepathic future - if indeed the technology ever becomes a reality in the way Jepsen and Musk hope it will. Jepsen says: "We have to answer these questions, so we're trying to make the hat only work if the individual wants it to work, and then filtering out parts that the person wearing it doesn't feel it's appropriate to share."
In Jepsen's absence, Facebook is hiring neuroscientists to help build brain-computer interfaces of its own, following founder Mark Zuckeberg's desire to develop means for telepathy.
Source

Last week, Facebook announced support for U2F Security Keys, to help keep accounts secure with our second-factor authentication feature called login approvals.
This is part of a larger story of industry investment and innovation around improving, and perhaps even replacing, the password. The truth is, technologies for login authentication like FIDO are only half of the story needed to keep accounts secure. The other half is account recovery—specifically, how do you regain access to your account if you lose your password, phone, or security key?
So-called “security questions” are widely acknowledged as both inconvenient and risky. They tend to be re-used across different accounts, making them even more dangerous than shared passwords. Recovery emails and SMS messages are common alternatives, and while they can get the job done, both are showing their age: neither offers the end-to-end security guarantees we expect from modern protocols, and these methods are becoming less reliable as the next billion people are getting online for the first time.
We need something better—a way to recover access, using identities and services you trust, regardless of whether they are associated with an email address or a phone number. This process needs to be easy, secure, and respectful of your privacy.
Some tools like Facebook Login and Trusted Contacts are part of the solution, but not every site uses the same features. Consider GitHub, a collaborative software development platform that hosts some of the most popular software in the world, including Facebook's own open source projects like React and osquery. GitHub maintains direct control of how it authenticates its users, how it assesses password strength and other risk signals, and how it deploys a diverse set of two-factor authentication methods.
So what do you do if you lose access to the phone number or security keys you use at GitHub? An email address alone can't provide the same level of two-factor authentication to recover access, so starting Tuesday, you'll be able to use your Facebook account to provide additional authentication as part of the recovery process at GitHub.
You'll need to set up this method in advance by saving a recovery token with your Facebook account. A recovery token is encrypted so Facebook can't read your personal information. If you ever need to recover your GitHub account, you can re-authenticate to Facebook and we will send the token back to GitHub with a time-stamped counter-signature. Facebook doesn't share your personal data with GitHub, either; they only need Facebook's assertion that the person recovering is the same who saved the token, which can be done without revealing who you are.
This can happen in just a few clicks in your browser, all over HTTPS.
We're releasing this feature in a limited fashion with GitHub so we can get feedback from the security community, including participants in our bug bounty programs. Not only will our implementation be immediately in-scope for our bounty programs, but Facebook and GitHub will jointly reward security issues reported against the specification itself, according to our impact criteria.
We would like to see more services adopt this account recovery design over the long run, so we are publishing the protocol behind this feature today on our open source site at GitHub:
https://github.com/facebookincubator/DelegatedRecovery/
Both Facebook and GitHub plan to publish open source reference implementations of the protocol in various programming languages to make it easy to build secure and privacy-preserving connections among your accounts and ensure you never lose access.
Soon, we hope to open the ability for any service to improve its account recovery experience using Facebook. We also want to offer the ability for people to use other accounts, such as a GitHub account, to help you recover your access to Facebook.
Usable security must cover all the ways we access our accounts, including when we need to recover them. We hope this solution will improve both the security and the experience when people forget a password or lose their phone and need to get back into their accounts.
Brad Hill is a Security Engineer at Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/improving-account-security-with-delegated-recovery/1833022090271267